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Friday, January 10, 2014

Building Image Previews in Lightroom

While importing from
your card, the right panel holds a large amount of options.

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At
the very top, you get to choose your preview options. Find and
click on “Build Previews”.

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You will see choices:
Minimal, Embedded & Sidecar, Standard and 1:1

Minimal
(Lightroom default) immediately show images using the smallest embedded
previews from the photos. This is the quickest method for getting your photos
into the Lightroom catalog. This will give you standard-sized thumbnail images.
You will need to wait for the previews to completely open before you start
working on your images. If you try to do both at the same time, Lightroom could
become sluggish.

Embedded & Sidecar displays the largest possible preview
available from the camera. It will take a bit longer than the Minimal option, but is faster
than choosing the Standard
option.

Standard
is the minimum that Lightroom can actually work with. This will take longer
than Minimal or Embedded & Sidecar. However,
when it is done, Lightroom will have previews that match the minimum
requirement for working in the Library. You can get to work on individual
images as they each complete importing. (Note: Adobe recommends
that when using a 23" or larger monitor it to is best to set the Standard
sized previews so that they are rendered at 2048 pixels.)

Importing your photos with the 1:1
preview size selected will result in Lightroom taking even longer to complete
the import process than would have been the case if standard-sized had been
chosen. 1:1
previews also take up significantly more disk space than standard-sized preview image. I would only use this option if I were importing one or two images and doing a great deal of work I needed to see in every exact detail.

If you're not going to be working on the photos immediately after import but do
need to get them into Lightroom as quickly as possible, your best option will
be to choose Minimal
import option. Once the photos have been imported choose either Render Standard-sized Previews
or Render 1:1 previews
from Library module Library>Previews menu.

Next thing to do, if you haven't already, is to test each of these import options out.